Augusto Murer was born in 1922 in Falcade (BL), he made a first apprenticeship at the Art Institute of Ortisei under Li Rosi's direction. But the true germination of his future poetics comes from the attendance with Arturo Martini. It was a short lived relation, lasting not longer than autumn 1943, until when the teacher and the student had to leave Venice to follow their opposite ideologies.
That short period, anyway, was very important for the evolution of Murer's language and for the refining of his aesthetic vision, until then based on a spontaneous attitude. In fact later Murer said that Martini took kim "the cataracts from his eyes" away and made him understand the difference between the beautiful and the bad.(Franco Basile).
The end of the war marked a rebirth of all the italian art and Murer took part in it with the enthusiasm that always marked him. Evidence of this first period can be found above all in Veneto:
- The portal and the "Via Crucis" in theChurch of Falcade (1946);
- " La Pietà" of the ossuary monument in Belluno (1949);
- " La Preghiera dei montanari", commissioned by the tourist organization board of Belluno and given to the Pope (1952)
- "Il Lavoro", a low-relief wood panel for the Chamber of Commerce of Belluno and many other woodworks belonging to the Museum of History and Art of Trieste, to the Collection of the Suzzara prize and to the National Museum of Bucarest.
But it is only during 1953 that Murer faced, at the Cairola Gallery in Milan (The courrent artists' official headquarter), the first real impact with a public of national level, supported by Orio Vergani, who signed the presentation in the catalogue, and by Renato Birolli who added a personal critical testimony.The Milanese exhibition and the constant presence at the Suzzara Prize let Murer enter the national environment and let him send some works to the international exhibitions.
Since 1964, when Murer realized the famous "Monumento alla Partigiana" in Venice, and until the most recent monuments in Mestre, Mirandola e Concordia (1985), his civil engagement was expressed in many public works that contributed to qualify his creativity.
In 1972-1973, with the big anthologies in Falcade and Milan (Rotonda della Besana), Murer’s work rised at the highest levels of the critical attention. The eighties signed for the artist his final consecration (even if for an artist, as he often said, the "definite", the final success, the conclusion of a work, the top of the creativity, are vain and inexistent words because every day you have to pass exams, and first of all with yourself).
- In 1975 in the " International Centre of Culture of Asiago", with Mario Rigoni Stern and Carlo Salinari, he presented ten etchings for "il Sergente nella Neve", that are collected in the catalogue "Ghe rivarem a baita?";
The big anthological exhibitions:
- in Ferrara (Palazzo dei Diamanti 1980-81);
- in Leningrado (Museo dell'Ermitage 1982);
- in Reggio Emilia (Isolato di San Rocco 1983);
- in Orvieto (Chiostro di San Giovanni 1984);
- in Viareggio (55^ Viareggio Prize 1984);
- in Milan (Palazzo del Senato 1984);
as well as the significant presence at the "Bimillenario Virgiliano" exhibition (Mantova, 1981) and at the XLI Biennale of Venice (Augusto Murer's sculptures in the open space, 1984), determined an important journey and the critics gradually moved from a simple liking to a deeper knowledge of his creative ability that goes over the realism and naturalism of the fifties and sixties.
The most recent interpretations of Murer’s work done by Dario Micacchi, Enrico Crispolti, Carlo Bo, Franco Farina and Alberto Bevilacqua, give a newer explanatory key to the famous essays of Andrea Zanotto, Giuseppe Mazzariol, Raffaele De Grada and Franco Solmi.
In 1982 A. Murer said: "This is not only my study, but a way to bring culture to Falcade...When it will not be an artist’s study anymore, it will be a museum".
The real addressee of this thought is the community that had an important part during all Murer's human and artistic life. This architecture is the wide and bright space that can receive works of other painters and sculptors, where you can read poetry and listen to the music: all around stand the quiet woods of Molino Basso and behind the needles of the Focobon.
A biography about Murer would be a fascinating subject because he lived an intense, passionate and extremely creative life; all the critics had to deal with this: his life was the true confirmation of engagement as an artist.
He was a man with big lively eyes and a wide, human smile; with strong arms and trunk as the man of the woods as he was. He was a man of plain humanity, generous and rich of intelligence and feelings, absorbed in his history with a sense of high lay religiusness, with wich he always looked at man. This personality of big moral sense is the first source of his characters. These, made of wood, stone and bronze live inside and outside his study in Molino. The most important themes of his poetic song are those of always: the woman, the man, the struggle, the game, the work, the love, the sacrifice, the life and the death.
Popular cantor, he was able to mix sapiently the words of the daily vulgar with the cultured traditional language, reaching results of high effectiveness and immediacy. Inside the culture of Veneto he stays with Noventa, Egidio Meneghetti, Tono Zancanaro, Arturo Martini, Giovanni Comisso and Andrea Zanzotto. For all of them the final aim of the art is to tell about life, about what always happens, which is apparently the same but every time different.
He condemned violence and sang the struggle that takes to freedom and peace. The monument in Vittorio Veneto, in its structural complexity and the figure of the Partigiana in Venice, in its terrible solitude, testify the necessity and the universality of this modern "epos".
The freedom of Murer’s artistic creation is total, in the sense that there’s no worry of formal coherence or of group tendency. The severity of every single work, above all the woods that remain his highest, original and solemn result, is inside the temporal process that brought to its creation: every work is a single tree, that one and only that one, but anyway necessary and complementary to all the others that A. Murer created for us and for those who will come, during the 50 years of his indefatigable, hard but happy effort.